Badly produced e-books

This blog entry struck a chord with me - free books are all very well, but the quality control can be absolutely awful.  Fine, if you are stuck on a plane for several hours, but certainly destructive of reading pleasure when the typos mean that you have to keep guessing what the author was saying.

The fact that Google Books can produce such rubbish is particularly depressing - isn't their motto something like, "Never do harm"?  I suppose that harming a text doesn't really count in their book.  [Sorry about the pun!]

E-book readers

The e-book reader market seems set to explode, at least from the supplier side. Whether the plethora of new devices will a) make it to market and b) sell enough to stay in business, is another matter. There's a report of new devices on display at CES this year on the ZD Net site, with prices ranging from $300 to $800 and more. Is anyone really going to spend $800 to read the daily newspaper? After all, if you are really pushed, you can probably pull it out of a trash can at the end of the day and read it for free :-) AND you can then shred it and use it as kitty litter!

A number of the readers are from new suppliers and I suspect that these will be the first to disappear: Amazon and Sony have been first to market (at least first successfully) and are likely to dominate, since they already have cash flow from their devices and will continue to develop, whereas a newcomer is going to find it difficult to establish themselves. Unless, of course, it is the promised Apple tablet...

How big will the market be, I wonder? The obvious user is the traveller, since it is easy to put several hundred books on to a reader and take up very little space in your travel bag, and the public transport commuter might also benefit, if the ambient lighting is good enough. I can see myself using one for these reasons, but not as a replacement for the book in the hand by the fireside or in bed. The younger generation may see things differently , of course: if the iPhone is a permanent extension of your hand and you spend virtually all day using it for one reason or another (including reading e-books), you may be attracted by something about the size of a paperback book, which will be easier to read and the lending of e-books from academic libraries is becoming a pretty standard service, so... time will tell.

E-books

The Washington Post has an article on the reaction of publishers to the e-book phenomenon. Curiously, the article can be downloaded through Calibre (the e-book library software) but does not seem to be on the Website. Even when using the exact title in the Post's search engine, it is not discovered. Odd! However, Calibre gives me the link to the original :-)
However, to the point. The article points out that:

There are now two constituencies: readers (and writers) on the one hand, and the publishing world on the other. And they don't want to hear each other.

Naturally enough, the authors want their books to be read, the readers want books as cheaply as they can get them, and the publishers want to charge as much as they can get away with.

In the print world, this works out to the publisher's advantage - they control the book flow and, to a significant degree, the pricing. In the electronic world, however, the readers know that the marginal cost of another electronic copy of a book is not the $9.99 that Amazon seems to be wanting to establish as the standard unit price, but something closer to the cost of a music track on iTunes.

My guess is that books are very price elastic (lower the price and you sell more), while the publishers want to maintain price in-elasticity in the hope of maximising profits. And yet the odd thing is that a number of examples suggest that if you give away electronic copies, people will want to buy the paper copy in larger numbers than the publishers ever believed possible. When you have a business model that says, If we sell 400 copies at $30.00 we'll make a profit, the possibility of being able to sell many additional electronic copies at $5.00 each, which may lead to the sale of more paper copies, doesn't seem to enter the marketing equation.

The article concludes:

But if the publishers want a role in the e-books business, they'll need to get over it and get on with it, embracing lower-priced e-books with higher author royalties. That seems unlikely. Because it's now clear that publishers just don't want to listen to what their customers are telling them.

and my guess is that it is the small publishing houses that will be the first to "get over it", while the big monoliths will take a lot more time.

Signs of panic?

Today's Guardian has an interesting article on Stephen Covey's digital rights deal with Amazon startles New York publishers. There are two stories: the first is about authors doing deals directly with Amazon for e-book publication of their work, bypassing the traditional print publisher, while the second is about publishers attempting to claim digital rights for their backlist of publications, in spite of the fact that a ruling by the New York courts, upheld on appeal, found that copyright for books that were written before digital publishing existed, remained with the author.

Like anyone else, I have no idea whether or not the e-book is actually going to take over from print. I'm promised a Sony Reader for my birthday, so I'll let you know of my experiences, in due course. I can imagine using it on a journey, and I've been looking at what can be downloaded freely - pretty well all the classics, of course, but a lot more besides. A lot of people are taking advantage of the Gutenberg Project to download thousands of the books there and selling DVDs loaded with them - I have one with about 17,000 works on it, but it is a pretty random, eclectic mix of stuff, thousands of which I shall never look at.

Whether that stuff is on the Reader or not, the fact that it is on my Mac means that there is an immediate store of material for reference, if for nothing else. But I can't see myself forsaking the printed book for ordinary leisure reading - a well printed book, on good paper (such as the Folio Society editions) is still a joy to handle and to read.

The electronic textbook

Peter Suber reports a paper in Nature - accessible only to subscribers - on the potential of the electronic open access text-book. I'm surprised that this has not developed sooner - I was forecasting back in 1995 that one of the first things to go open access would be the text book. And it hasn't happened.

I still find it curious: most text book authors decide to write a new one because they find the existing ones imperfect, from their point of view. They trial material with their own students (often mentioning this in a dedication) and then try to sell it in a market already packed with text books. I put the search terms "statistical" and "introduction" into Amazon.com and it came up with 8,393 results Who actually needs another introduction to statistics?

So, instead of chopping down the trees - when, given the odds, it is likely that only your own students are going to benefit, why not create an open access text and invite others of like mind to contribute? Build in links to Websites and OA journals and you'll have a richer resource for your students (and more easily kept up-to-date) than any print on paper version.

Come to think of it - and putting my money where my mouth is - if there is anyone out there who would like to collaborate on an "introduction to modern information management", please get in touch. I'll be happy to create a site at InformationR.net and take it from there.

Amazon and e-books

Cyberspaces is abuzz with news of Amazon's e-book reader, Kindle, for example at the ZDNet site there's a review and pictures. In the review, Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying

"This is a 500 year technology and we forget that it’s a technology. As readers we don’t think about this too often", said Bezos. "An interesting question is why are books the last bastion of analog".

The answer: Books disappear when you read them. They fill their role and get out of the way. "What remains is the author’s world", said Bezos, referring to the reader "flow state".

It seems very odd that a bookseller - on the other hand, he's not a real bookseller, is he? - should say that books disappear when your read them. That suggests that he has no idea of what people do with books - they are an instrument of social interaction: we talk about them, we exchange them, we lend them (occasionally) to friends, we pass them on to charity shops and many of us keep those we treasure to read again and again, and even if we pass the physical object on, some of what we read remains in our consciousness.

E-book readers may become a new fashion item, but unless I am very much mistaken, they'll never replace the printed book - the book just has too many 'affordances' that a computer screen lacks - and apart from anything else, if I leave a paperback on the train before having read it, I can pick up another secondhand copy from Amazon for a fiver - if I leave my 'Kindle' behind I'm nearly $400 out of pocket!

New Sony e-book reader

Noted on the Crave blog: Sony opens book on new Reader
and on LIS News